Big news in the RSS world as Dave Winer announces that he is leaving the RSS Advisory Board. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank him for all his hard work on this format. Back in the late 90s, when RSS was about to die a quick death after Netscape abandoned it, it was Dave that cured it back to health, realizing its potential and working hard to turn it into something that would be more significant than just presenting items on the Netscape personal page. Dave has been a controversial figure in the RSS world but without his contribution, RSS would not be what it is today. Other efforts in the syndication space have withered and died but Dave continued being the “defender of the RSS faith” and ensured that it continued evolving. Last year, in an attempt to make his own personality a non-issue in the future of RSS, he created the RSS advisory board and put RSS under a creative commons license. Like him or not, you can’t deny that Dave has been the biggest contributor to the RSS world to date. Congrats Dave on moving on and here’s to hoping that you’ll continue being involved.

2004 is obviously the year of RSS, with article popping up left and right in mainstream publications. However, RSS can also be a source of much stress, if you subscribe to too much. A few weeks ago, my list of subscribed feeds went over 300. That was the beginning of a sobering experiment. While it is technically possible to follow 300 sites via RSS, it’s not for the faint-hearted. I’ve since been pruning the list a little as it became more and more time consuming to go through all the entries. While I felt like I must be failing somehow, Sebastien Paquet pointed out that the median number of subscriptions people have is under 100. I suspect this is where the power laws actually become useful. Because some blogs are disproportionally read, they can be seen as flag-bearers in the blogosphere. Because they are so powerful, they can easily shape opinions in the blog world. And because they do so, one can limit the number of blogs they read in order to get an idea as to consensus among blogsters. This is great in that those powerful bloggers become editors of sorts. There is, however, a problem with that. As…

I’ve just set up a new page that should be able to receive entries automatically. If you want to participate in the “Faces of 9/11” memorial, create a link to that page from your entry and then click on the link. The page should automatically do a ping back and grab your page’s title and add it to the list. My reason for doing this is simple. First, it will allow to put up links at a much quicker rate and second, it might allow me to develop an RSS feed to people can then use to post all the links on THEIR site. Think of it as an attempt to decentralize the project.

There’s a lot of developments going on in the online space but most of them, while potentially changing the state of online business for years to come, have been flying under the radar for most people. It is interesting to see that what some of us are witnessing is really the beginning of a silent revolution, currently underway but far from the glare of most journalists and of the general population. An example of this is the weblog. While the more web-savvy participants amongst us are very familiar with the concept, there seems to be a lack of understanding of what blogs are about. Most dismiss them as diaries (which some blogs, like those hosted by LiveJournal, truly are) but fail to realize that there is a lot more going on in the space. I recently had a chance to discuss emerging trends in technology with a number of Internet executives for large companies and was very surprised to see how quickly the weblog phenomenon is being dismissed. What I suspect is that this is largely the result of the complexity of weblogland, an area that is hard to really classify neatly in a few buzzwords. A world where Glenn…